New York State Route 19 - History

History

In 1908, the New York State Legislature established a statewide legislative route system that initially consisted of 37 unsigned routes. The system included three segments of what is now NY 19, two of which were located south of Le Roy. The longest of the three pieces extended from modern NY 305 in Belfast to NY 5 in Le Roy and comprised most of Route 16, which also continued southwest along current NY 305 to Cuba. Two smaller segments, from the southeastern end of the overlap with current NY 417 in Wellsville to County Route 20 (CR 20) in Belvidere and from what is now NY 31 south of Brockport to West Avenue in the village, became part of Route 4 and Route 30, respectively. On March 1, 1921, several routes were added, removed, or modified as part of a partial renumbering of New York's legislative route system. The portion of Route 30 between Medina and Rochester became part of an extended Route 20 while Route 16 was realigned to follow modern NY 19A between Fillmore and Gainesville. Lastly, the portion of modern NY 19 between NY 417 and NY 248 at Stannards was included in the new Route 46.

When the first set of posted routes in New York were assigned in 1924, the pieces of Route 4 between Belvidere and Wellsville and Route 20 along Main Street in Brockport were designated as part of NY 17 and NY 3, respectively. By 1926, the pre-1921 routing of Route 16 between Belfast and Pavilion was designated as part of NY 62, a route that continued south along modern NY 19 to Belvidere and northwest to the Lake Ontario shoreline by way of what is now NY 63. In the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York, NY 17 was realigned between Olean and Wellsville to follow a new, more southerly routing while NY 62 became part of NY 19, a new route that extended from the Pennsylvania state line to Lake Ontario by way of former NY 62, NY 17's former routing from Wellsville to Belvidere, the segment of legislative Route 46 north of Stannards, and a previously unnumbered highway between Stannards and the Pennsylvania border. At the same time, the portion of legislative Route 16 between Pavilion and Le Roy became part of NY 63, which extended north to the lakeshore in Hamlin by way of what is now NY 19. The alignments of NY 19 and NY 63 north of Pavilion were flipped c. 1939.

Within the village of Wellsville, NY 19 and NY 17 (later NY 417) were originally routed on North and South Main streets. In the early 1970s, construction began on an arterial bypassing downtown Wellsville to the west. It was opened to traffic as part of a realigned NY 19 and NY 417 in October 1977. In Hamlin, the segment of NY 19 between North Hamlin Road and the Lake Ontario State Parkway was originally maintained by Monroe County as the unsigned CR 232. In 2007, ownership and maintenance of that segment of NY 19 was transferred from Monroe County to the state of New York as part of a highway maintenance swap between the two levels of government. A bill (S4856, 2007) to enact the swap was introduced in the New York State Senate on April 23 and passed by both the Senate and the New York State Assembly on June 20. The act was signed into law by Governor Eliot Spitzer on August 28. Under the terms of the act, it took effect 90 days after it was signed into law; thus, the maintenance swap officially took place on November 26, 2007.